eTived “ Just the Reqd Berlin a 10 the : n ~ Pushed p, er ‘Plage’ ; Peculiar change took Wer ~ Poungin, me. then ea Fe thas "25 3 thy. ed Mey me last Frogs Poss ine ded aging ti essed this quality Ten years after V-E Day | 7 rc had been a long road, strewn ty Corpses, that we followed Sm the day our T-16 carriers Bt OF the landing’ craft onto - Normandy beaches until we a this mortar position Sei Oldenburg in Ger- Now the war was nearly over, Army was fighting in Ary nd on every battlefront Writhi ree Wehrmacht was ng in its final agony. Whole ards the end of April the a eseern front loosened up. the ett the Toronto Scottish of hert | nd Division I had taken mm iM the campaign in north- Sis which culminated as Plure of Groningen and Ge, surrender of thousands of troops who had been ack ae the Dutch North en the Second Di- : "3 Made a quick end run t €rmany and our TSR mor- egan lobbing bombs into Ene largest city between and Weser. knew the war was al- And because we Veter, Us. Battle-hardened death aes had sneered at Ting the fierce fighting ae n and Falaise, who it some 4 the Schelde Estuary Tents gs the bloodiest engage- ‘ ‘ a swat, now suddenly tien: ‘ Cautious as gre Ng » entering action, ae j remember as a student Rae Ore the First World nding was to Einstein ex- ‘4’. his. Relativity Theory fully developed) to a f famous scientists in at that time the Scientific thought in Meeting with a student’s glee I ee @ number of profes- out in rage at the Ri At nonsense” he was talk- ine Native power, At every step Stance ,@Cal argument, for in- We are he questions with which Teally Ss gli 2 qe ing are—Is Dilitys Pelusion the only possi- other “an we imagine any Sk hundred. years two : on to an outstanding Mae made and Einstein. Both cattmman +,Profound difference “ction, thought and human Mary, @dignation with which | Vi Sones Man fo, Ved the exploitation of “ fatale vate Profit drove him Shs iat © underlying assump-— ~~ Were unconsciously “bitalion our thinking about into In ‘doing this he contrat? relief the in- Mic ‘sty dictions in the econ- 2 the Slure of our society. Qramate "® Way Einstein gave thinking bye to our way of and at ‘ut the world around _, wt the” same time laid ine were tightly imprison-— By BERT WHYTE “No, point in dying now,” we said to each other, licking our lips nervously and digging our slit trenches to regulation depth ‘for the first time in many months. The fatalism so essential to good soldiers disappeared as the thought struck us: “Keep alive a few more days and we'll go home again—home to our loved ones.” Death, our constant companion for so long, and to whom we had become contemptuous and _ indif- ferent, now became a_ personal enemy. When a comrade step- ped on a mine, and had his face blown off, we rushed to help ban- dage him and send him quickly tc the rear in a jeep, and all the while each of us whispered to ourselves: “Thank God it wasn’t me!” Hitler was kaput. The end was near. But as long as the guns boomed, bombs dropped and bullets zinged past, we were not safe from Death. And our longing for Life grew and’ grew. \ At 8 am. May 5 “cease fire” sounded on the Canadian front. A pe of days later, at 2.41 a.m., May 7, 1945, in a small schoolroom in Rheims, Frances, two German officers signed the documents of unconditional sur- render for all German forces everywhere.. But I- wasn’t in Germany on VE-Day. ~ On April 29 a minor miracle bare the possibility of atomic power. Horrified at the destruc- tive use to which this was being put Einstein publicly lent his great moral weight to the move- ment for peace. The first imaginative attempt to break through the rigid frame- work of ideas, such as imprison- ed the professors at Goettingen, was made in the latter half of the ‘17th century by the Danish as- tronomer Roemer. He had been. watching and timing the ‘successive eclipses of the moons of Jupiter as they passed into the shadow of that planet, and noticed that as the distance of the earth from Jupi- ter increased the intervals be- came longer—and vice versa. At that time it was naturally assumed that when a light ap- peared anywhere it ‘was seen instantaneously everywhere. How, then, could the distance of the earth from Jupiter make any difference? To resolve this contradiction required an imaginative effort of occurred to me. While I was sitting talking to. my mortar crew, after finishing a “shoot” in the direction of Oldenburg, a dispatch ridér rode up, waving an -order granting me 10 days United Kingdom leave. In less time than it takes to write this, I was on my way back to com- pany headquarters. Then came the jarring, jolting truck ride to Nijmegen, the train trip to a tran- sit camp on the French coast, the ship to England—how good it was to see dear old England again! ~ Up to London, of course, but I didn’t linger long in the Big Smoke. On to Brighton, where my regiment had been stationed the previous year, and where I had many comrades and friends. It was there that I celebrated VE-Day. And because my friends included a number of buxom bar- maids at several pubs, who kept precious “doubles” hidden under the counter for me until I arriv- ed on my rounds, I suffered not. One thing only marred the celebration. At the back of my mind was a gnawing anxiety about the welfare of my mortar crew, who were closer to me than - brothers. Had anyone “got it” in the last days, the last hours of battle? : I wasn’t really happy until my leave ended and I ‘returned to Germany to find all crew mem- os Professors raged at h BY HYMAN LEVY the first order. Roemer not only did so by asserting that light took time to travel, but actually calculated its speed from his times of eclipse. How far-reaching was this bold assertion may be realized if we grasp the fact that it implied that we never see things as they are but as they were. * It was not until the turn of this century that another habit ef thought embodied in this very imaginative stroke aroused yet another contradiction. The notion of speed is drawn from the movement of things— actual bodies. Speeds are rela- tive. cars approaching each other is much greater than if one were simply. overtaking the other. Two American scientists, Mich- elson and Morley, devised an ex- periment to measure the speed of light when the earth was approaching the source of the ight in the sky and when the earth was receding from that The relative speed of two. Red Army men and USS. soldi April 25, 1945, as. VE-Day drew near. Now, just 10 years later, » Set ers met as comrades on the Etbe atomaniacs in Washington are trying desperately to convince us that the Soviet people should be regarded as enemies. ; bers safe and sound. In fact, they hadn’t even fired a bomb since my departure. * “We've seen too much to re- member,” said a soldier in Henri Barbusse’s great novel of the First World War, Under Fire. “And everything we've seen was too much. We’re not made to hold it all. We're too little to hold ‘it.” oe “That’s true what he says,” re- marked a comrade. “When I was on leave, I found I'd already for- gotten what had happened to me before. There were some let- ters from me that I read over again just as if they were a book I was opening.. And yet in spite of that, I’ve forgotten also about all the pain I’ve had in the war. We're forgetting-machines. Men are things that think a little but chiefly forget. That’s what we are ear. “Then neither the other side source. , Naturally they expected a dif- ference depending on the speed of the earth. What was their amazement to discover that there was no difference. light, whatever the circumstances in which is was measured, was always the samé. Here, then, was a new con- tradiction—a speed that had no relative value, an absolute, in fact. ; To Einstein the problem was a challenge and a direct one. How could this absolute, this un- changing quality of light, be used as the measuring rod, as it were, against which all other relative changes could be judged? : It would take us too far into technical detail to trace the course of the argument. sufficient to point out the fact that since this unchanging speed of light itself involves both space _and time as all speeds do there can be no unique separation be- tween them, as we have always imagined. se oes { Sration. é y The enuations have the mathematical properties n four equations, shown in the accompanying [YIug=——— Go 3 Te" O 3 Rin Os 9 | which seem to be _ required in order to describe the known effects, but they 4 mest Ey ia ginst observed physical facts beforo their yalig: bat f ¢ The speed of kee ea nor us‘l remember! So much misery all wasted!” “Ah, if one did remember!” cried some one. Tf we remembered,” said an- other, “there wouldn’t be any more war.” . * On Remembrance Day we re- member, our dead. On VE-Day, 1955, let us remember our vic- tory over fascism in the Second World War—and pledge to our dead comrades that never again shall we let fascist madmen, whatever their nationality, plunge the world into war again. Let us — the people ef the world — put an end to war. Let us put our names down for peace, on the great World Appeal Against the Preparations for Atomic War. Let us all raise our voices — workers, farmers, writers, scientists, artists, church- men — and shout: “NO MORE WAR!” is ‘nonsense’ Space-time, and not an absolute _ space alone becomes the seat of natural process and natural change. * Once the imagiaative mind of Einstein had become accustomed to this new way of thinking, new regions of understanding began to open up, in very much the same way as social changes be- gin to take on a rational pattern once the fundamentals of Marx- ism have been grasped. The Geometry of Euclid, as we learnt it at school, was the geo- metry of space as a thing in it- self. What Einstein asked is— What is the Geometry of Space- time? ae Ifa straight line is the natural path of a particle of matter in an isolated space, why not take the actual motions of particles in the presence of other pieces of matter as a guide to what has now to be regarded as the new “straight line”? : cs Out of this emerged the Geo- metry of Space-time, a “curved — space-time” in which the New- tonian Law of Gravitation finds itself expressed as geometrical — property. Et must have required a bold and venturesome imagination to “swim in these vast seas of thought alone” until the minds ’ of others could be habituated to think as he did. : re It will take many years for ‘the full implications of Einstein’s mode of approach to be worked cut, just as the full impact of Marx will not be sensed until Einstein’s formula from his: paper, “Generalized Theory of Gravitation,” an attempt to interrelate _ further vast changes take place all known physical phenomena. in the structure’ of society. PACIFIC TRIBUNE — MAY 6, 1955 — PAGE 9